Thirty Girls by Susan Minot brings to light the atrocities committed by Joseph Kony and the Lord’s Resistance Army in Uganda for the past 30 years, where thousands of children have been abducted and forced to become child soldiers. The girls are taken as sex slaves and servants, many as young as ten years old. In Thirty Girls, Minot highlights a group of girls taken from a Catholic boarding school in the middle of the night and made famous worldwide…
What I Had Before I Had You is the debut novel by Sarah Cornwell. I read this book in a day, I just couldn’t put it down. It is the story of Olivia Reed, now a mother in her 30’s divorced and returning to her hometown of Ocean View on the Jersey shore. When her 9 year old bi-polar son goes missing, she revisits the summer she was 15, when her life changed forever, and she recalls memories of the…
Shadow of Night by Deborah Harkness is part two of the All Souls Trilogy. It picks up where A Discovery of Witches left off, with Oxford scholar and witch Diana Bishop and Vampire geneticist Matthew Clairmont traveling back in time to Elizabethan England, where they encounter Sir Walter Raleigh, William Shakespear and a number of other famous people of the time. They are searching for the alchemical manuscript that Diana came across in the first book, and Diana meets a…
I was in the mood for some really beautiful writing, so I thought I would revisit one of my favorite books, Gilead by Mailynne Robinson. Set in the small town of Gilead, Iowa in the 50’s and told through the voice of a Congregational preacher, Gilead is full of many gems, and rare honesty and grace. Reverend John Ames is at the end of his life, and the book is written as a long letter to his young son that…
A Discovery of Witches is the first book in Deborah Harkness’ All Souls Trilogy. Maybe because my daughter is going through a Harry Potter phase, I have been recently drawn to reading more books about magic and supernatural beings. This book pulled me in right away. Diana Bishop is a very powerful witch who has been denying her power since her parents were killed when she was a little girl. She is a scholar and teacher in Oxford and while…
Fallout by Sadie Jones is a novel set in London in the 70’s. Jones captures the feeling of London’s theater scene at the time, focusing on four young people in their 20’s as they come together as actors, writers, producers, and stage managers, falling in and out of love and friendship. I loved Luke, the main character, but had such a hard time liking or believing in Nina, his love interest, at times the novel seemed contrived to me. However,…
The Museum of Extraordinary Things is the new novel by Alice Hoffman. The novel is set in New York City in 1911. At the center of the book is Coralie, daughter of a cruel man who runs The Museum of Extraordinary Things in Coney Island. The museum is full of every kind of freak of nature he can find or create, including his own daughter, turning her into a human mermaid. When Coralie comes upon a young photographer one night…
The Glass Ocean by Lori Baker had the potential to be a fascinating story, but instead I found it tedious and almost impossible to get through. Baker tells the story of Leo Dell’Orro and Clotilde Girard who meet aboard the Narcissus, a boat on expedition in the 1840’s. Leo is hired to draw pictures of all the specimens collected from the ocean, and later, after Clotilde’s father mysteriously disappears, they get married and live in England where Leo finds work…
The Thinking Woman’s Guide to Real Magic by Emily Croy Barker is a very entertaining novel, if you can get past the silly title. Barker has written a Harry Potter type fairy tale for adults. Nora, the protagonist, gets lost hiking on a mountain and wanders into another realm full of wizards and magicians, both good and bad. Here she meets the magician Aruendiel, who begins to teach her real magic so she can survive, and try to make her…
The Other Story is a novel by Tatiana de Rosnay. It is the story of Nicholas Kolt, a French author who doesn’t handle his rise to fame well. When his one and only book becomes a bestseller, then an Oscar winning movie, he starts leading the high life and becomes addicted to following himself on Facebook, Twitter and all internet and social networking sites. The main character is so unlikable, that it is hard to care about anything in this…